Neutron monitor using microfission chambers for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor

Abstract

We are designing microfission chambers, which are pencil size gas counters with fissile material inside, to be installed in the vacuum vessel as neutron flux monitors for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). We computed the neutron and gamma flux around the shielding blanket by a two-dimensional neutron calculation, in order to find suitable locations for microfission chambers. We found that the U238 microfission chambers are not suitable because the detection efficiency will increase up to 50% during the ITER lifetime by breeding U239. We propose to install U235 microfission chambers on the front side of the back plate in the gap between adjacent blanket modules and behind the blankets at ten poloidal locations. One chamber will be installed in the divertor cassette, just under the dome. Employing both the pulse counting mode and Campbelling mode in the electronics, we can accomplish the ITER requirement of 107 dynamic range, with 1 ms temporal resolution, and eliminate the effect of gamma rays. An in-vessel neutron monitor will be affected by changes of the detection efficiency due to the change in the plasma position and neutron source profile. Here we demonstrate by neutron Monte Carlo calculation with three-dimensional modeling that we avoid those detection efficiency changes by installing microfission chambers at several poloidal locations inside the vacuum vessel.